Increasing Fill light doesn't seem to bring out too much noise. I think that increasing Exposure brings out noise more though. From what I've seen anyway. And I personally don't care for Recovery too much; but that's mainly when i use it for daytime pics. I might use it a tiny bit here and there; but I like turning down brightness, and sometimes Highlights to fight those problem areas.
I've found that fill light can definitely bring out the noise, but it all depends on your camera, the colors in your photo, the starting ISO level, etc... you are essentially "pushing" the exposure in the dark areas, so any noise that was there to begin with will be brought out, along with the other details that you did want to recover. Still, it's a vital tool; I use it in a big percentage of my photos. The much-improved noise reduction in LR3 helps me feel that much more confident about using it liberally when needed.
Now, I've got a photo for the thread... I usually lean towards a more realistic, less saturated photo than some of the posters here, which means less post-processing. This shot, for whatever reason, inspired me to take it farther than most of my other shots. (The fact that it won't be there next time I visit helps, too!)
Here's how it looks out of the camera, with only a very, very minor crop and tilt adjustment. The WB is "as shot", 5050/+13, and the rest is my "standard" import preset that I apply to all photos - +28 Contrast, +7 Clarity, +16 Vibrance, +42 sharpening.
First step was to do something about the white balance. This was shot with an old pre-AI Nikkor 105mm F2.5 (yes, mounted on my Pentax K-5 - I like to mix things up sometimes
), which tends to skew the WB a little bit; plus being in the shade and then having the reflection in the sun didn't help. I used the WB dropper and basically ended up with a "cloudy" WB - 6500/+12.
Better, but still too dark. After some fiddling, I settled on Fill Light of 26, Blacks of 5, Brightness of 57, and Contrast of 26.
Still better, but I decided to amp up the contrast and saturation. Vibrance went to 33 and saturation to 10. One trick that I have found can really give a "pop" without going too over the top is to adjust the tone curve direction; in this case, Lights went to 52 and Darks to 24. Highlights and Shadows remain at 0. This brings out the middle of the photo nicely, giving it some fullness without losing detail in the bright or dark areas.
I was happy with the colors but the composition was still leaving me a little flat. There was too much business in the background, and what you could see was confusing to the eye - it didn't make sense if you didn't know already what you were looking at. I decided to give this a
big vignette, to really emphasis the mirror. To that effect, in post-crop vignetting, I ended up with -100 Amount and 36 Midpoint and 53 Feather. The Highlights slider did some nice things to the scrollwork in the lower right, but also brought up an area in the upper left that was floating all alone, so I left that at 0. The vignetting also allowed the higher saturation to not look quite as distractingly unreal IMHO, too.
After all that, here's the final image:
Snow White's Scary Adventures mirror by
Groucho Dis, on Flickr
Lightroom. First I have to give a big thanks to Scott for starting this thread and demonstrating some of the great things Lightroom can do. And to get me over my fear of processing. I reprocessed this shot...
(unless it's a point-and-shoot)
